Short War Stories : Books: Tim O’Brien’s new work features Vietnam scenes, but “The Things They Carried” is not about bullets; it’s about love and life after death, he says.

Well, of course it’s fiction, Tim O’Brien was saying.

He had a big smile on his face, and he was drinking coffee and Kahlua while he talked, as little as possible, about his new book, “The Things They Carried” (Houghton Mifflin, $18.95).

He was saying it was a novel, fiction, get it? None of it really happened. It all came out of the author’s head. Honest.

So what if the protagonist of this alleged novel happens to be named, yes, Tim O’Brien.

So what if, just like the real Tim O’Brien, that character grew up in Minnesota, went to Macalester College and did graduate work at Harvard University.

Or if both Tim O’Briens were drafted out of college and served 14 months in Vietnam.

Or if both are writers, and both are 43 years old.

“Hey, it’s fiction. It’s a novel,” the author said. This Tim O’Brien is so real that on this frosty Cambridge afternoon he was holed up in one of the town’s trendier establishments, fortifying himself for a dental appointment and a reading at the nearby Brattle Theater.

So how much of that stuff in this book is real? How many of the experiences in this rich collection of closely connected short stories and vignettes really happened to the Tim O’Brien who arrived for an afternoon encounter looking like an aging school kid, wearing jeans and a baseball cap?

“None of it. I made it all up. It’s fiction. Stories.”

Unlike the one in the book, this Tim O’Brien, the putative real one, does not have a 9-year-old daughter named Kathleen who rides him relentlessly about his role in the Vietnam War, and why he keeps writing about it, why he doesn’t write instead about something interesting, like someone who finds a million dollars and spends it all on a Shetland pony.

“You keep writing these war stories,” Kathleen says in the book, “so I guess you must’ve killed somebody.”

Because he does not have a daughter named Kathleen, or, for that matter, any children, this Tim O’Brien does not respond by taking her on his lap and hoping that some day, when she is older, she will ask again.

Maybe if she did O’Brien could tell her why, after writing a nonfiction memoir about Vietnam, “If I Die in a Combat Zone,” and after winning the American Book Award in 1979 for a novel about Vietnam, “Going After Cacciato,” he continues to write about that war in Southeast Asia.

“Because there are all these great stories,” he said.

“Nothing else ever happens in my life, and you’ve got to do something, you’ve got to write about something. All these interesting things happened in Vietnam. If you’re a writer, and you’ve got all these memories like I’ve got, you’d be crazy not to use them.”

After “Cacciato,” the comparison “is inevitable.” O’Brien knows that. An editor who first heard his proposal to write about Vietnam almost 20 years ago discouraged him. Why did he want to write about something depressing like war? And why, that editor might ask, does he keep harping about that same wretched war?

O’Brien, the real one, knows that the analogy he is about to make may sound lofty or even self-serving. But he makes it anyway.

“It’s like Shakespeare has written Henry IV and he does Richard III, and people say, ‘Oh, no, another king story,’ ” O’Brien said. “They are utterly different. The hearts of these stories are utterly different. It’s not about kings at all. It’s about hearts and souls.”

This Tim O’Brien, the Tim O’Brien who is nervous about his dental appointment, who has brought a suit to change into for his reading, because “my publisher would kill me if I went like this,” did not have a childhood sweetheart named Linda who died of cancer. The waxy sweet smell of the funeral home where Linda is laid out leaps off the pages of “The Things They Carried,” but even that scene, O’Brien insists, is entirely invented. No youthful love, no tragic death, no imaginary conversations with a Linda who returned to life and asked, “Do I look dead?”

So far as this Tim O’Brien remembers, no one in his acquaintance in Vietnam imported a girlfriend from the United States. The nonexistent all-American girl did not become infatuated with the war; she did not wear a necklace made of human tongues and wander into the combat arena.

O’Brien, the author, makes it seem so genuine. He was there, wasn’t he? But then he teases his reader, insisting in a brief epigraph that “all the incidents, names and characters . . . are imaginary.” As a further joust, O’Brien turns around and dedicates “The Things They Carried” to “the men of Alpha Company,” his supposedly make-believe unit in Vietnam.

But some things in O’Brien’s new book, OK, maybe just a few things, are at least semi-authentic. O’Brien did do his infantry training in Washington state, site of the haunting “On the Rainy River.” He did think about fleeing to Canada, and even went so far as to call the Vancouver travel bureau for information.

“There was this nice lady who answered the phone, and she said ‘Can I send you any brochures?’ ” O’Brien recalled. It makes him laugh to think about it now, travel posters of scenic Canada coming to a kid in infantry training, on his way to Vietnam.

He replied, “Not to Ft. Lewis, thanks.”

So “some of it is true,” O’Brien finally conceded. “Not in the literal sense,” more in “the way I worried about it, about being judged.”

Just “21, 22, I don’t know, however old you are when you get out of college,” O’Brien said he was squeezed in a moral dilemma of that era. “I wanted to save my honor and, at the same time, not go fight that war.

“Now that I am as old as I am, I like to think I wouldn’t have gone. But until you are in that position of having to make a choice like that, you have to believe you would do the right thing.

“Until you are in that situation, it’s easy to believe, ‘well sure, I’m a hero,’ but then you’re in that situation.” It is not so easy, not so clear, O’Brien was saying.

It was a terrible choice for so many thousands of young men, he said.

“My intellect was saying, ‘run to Canada,’ but my emotions were saying, ‘what’s your dad going to say?’

“And you’ve got this girlfriend, what’s she going to say? You’re 21 years old.”

Looking back, O’Brien said, “I bet you a lot of guys went to that war for the reasons I did, because they were afraid of being embarrassed in front of their parents or girlfriends.”

O’Brien may write about Vietnam, but he does not live, eat, sleep, breathe Vietnam. This is not a guy who has nightmares about battles, “all that simpering Vietnam veteran stuff,” he said.

He has just read Shelby Foote’s three-volume history of the Civil War. “Now that was an awful war,” he said.

It is arguable, O’Brien agrees, that cynics might charge him with exploiting the war in Vietnam, of obsessing in print about his experiences there.

“It may be exploitative,” he said. “But art exploits. Homer exploited the Trojan wars, and thank God.”

In the case of Vietnam, “I’m hoping art will salvage the exploitation,” he said. “The whole purpose is to try to get something beautiful out of that awful war.”

Besides, O’Brien said, “that’s the neat thing about books. That’s how culture survives.” Fiction, he said, “keeps it alive.

“One function of art is to shape the cultural memory,” O’Brien said. “The details of what actually happened are eventually going to vanish. People may remember the Gulf of Tonkin or Tet, but most of that stuff will be lost. The details of Vietnam will be gone, and what we will have left is its aimlessness.”

He returned to his early comparison: “What do we remember from the Trojan War? It’s from Homer. Nothing else is left.”

In the end, O’Brien said he named his central character after himself “just for fun,” and because it’s a “neat” idea. “There’s a certain joy to it. It frees you to do anything you want. When you start telling lies about yourself--well, if you do it credibly, the reader is going to believe you.

“I found it really liberating,” he said. “You open doors by lying about yourself.”

The whole point of this book, O’Brien said, was “to touch people’s hearts and minds.

“Mainly I want to give a sort of full-bodied pleasure,” he said, smiling playfully. “Like Pepsi cola. You know, it tingles.”

And finally, what he was writing about in the four years it took him to complete this book was not about “the stuff of war, bombs and bullets.”

This new book “is about people being just and brave,” he said. “It’s about love, and God, and life after death.”

He stood up and got ready to head off to the dentist.

“It’s not even a novel, really,” Tim O’Brien said. “It’s a book.”